this type of tragedy will never be repeated
No, it's being repeated right now in FL too! There is a "wife" trying to get the mother's guardianship revoked so that she can starve and dehydrated the husband and son.
Very much a copycat crime.
The Jacksonville, Fla. Sheriffs Department has an open investigation in the case of the Jacksonville man who suffered serious head injuries and brain damage last September in the kitchen of his home in suspicious circumstances, according to the Justice Coalition of Jacksonville.
The case has striking similarities to the Terri Schindler-Schiavo case of Pinellas County.
The wife of Scott Thomas, 34, says he fell backwards over the family dog, striking his head but doctors for the incapacitated man say that his injuries arent consistent with such a fall.
His wife, Eliza, 29, a Polish immigrant who Scott married about three years ago to keep her from being deported, has petitioned the court to move her husband to a hospice and remove his feeding tube to cause his death although his doctors and family and he is making steady progress towards recovery.
The Justice Coalition, a crime victims advocacy group, entered the case Monday.
Ann Dugger, executive director of the Justice Coalition, said that an investigator for the sheriffs department has confirmed that the matter is under investigation.
Scotts mother, Pamela Patton, also of Jacksonville, has temporary guardianship but his wife has asked the court to appoint her.
The family had filed a complaint in October with Floridas Department of Children and Families, statutorily charged with investigating complaints of alleged abuse, neglect and exploitation but family members said DCF told them the agency could not become involved because Scott was not disabled at the time of the alleged incident. However, he had just returned home from a hospital stay, one of several in the last couple of years for unexplained stomach problems.
Two years after the couple were married, Scott starting getting mysteriously ill with stomach pain and about every three months has been hospitalized. His mother says that although doctors have done numerous tests, they could not diagnose the cause of her sons sickness.
DCF reportedly told the family that they would keep their file open.
The fact that we were able to intercede with calls and such in the case of Mae MaGouirk, and now the new case with the wife trying to starve her husband, is solely due to our being newly informed that this is happening. I am sure that millions of people are shocked to hear about all this for the first time, and to hear that it has already been going on for many years.
In an analogous manner, I was shocked in 1973 to hear about something called "abortion" and it still inconceivable to me that such things can occur in a civilized country. Yet by 1973 there were already 500,000 annually (and "legal"-izing it merely tripled the number).
So I feel that we have been deceived by the fact that all this this becomes entrenched and institutionalized, so our efforts come not at the beginning of the incidence, when we could hope to influence attitudes and behaviors, but when they have already been (without our knowledge) accepted as normal by an entrenched power structure and we face fierce resistance to what they then see as an unnecessary "change" (restoring what we thought was the status quo of the presumption for life).